21 Million UK Households Now Have an Internet Connection

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has issued its annual 2012 Internet Access (Households and Individuals) report, which found that 21 million households in Great Britain (80%) now have an internet connection (up from 77% in 2011 [19 million]) and 93% of those use broadband. The report also highlights a Rural vs Urban Digital Divide.

It’s noted in the results that 30% of broadband households use a superfast broadband cable (Virgin Media) or “fibre optic connection” (i.e. BT’s FTTC or FTTP service). ONS’s report also splits the different broadband technologies by location (i.e. rural vs urban adoption). As you’d expect the proportion of rural areas with superfast access, which are more costly to connect and thus suffer the lowest speeds, is well below that of towns and cities.

Separately the report finds that 5.2 million households are without Internet access, yet interesting the most common reason for this cited by 54% of those affected is that they “did not need it” (up from 34% in 2006). Clearly almost 3 million people have no desire to go online anytime soon, while the rest lacked the skills (22%) or found the computer costs (15%) or access costs (14%) to simply be too high.

2012 Internet Access – UK Households and Individuals Report (PDF)
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_275775.pdf